Purism will ship its privacy-focused Librem 5 phone next April

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Over the past few years, San Francisco-based hardware startup Purism has been working on a phone that promises more privacy and security than the rest. It now has a shipping date for its crowdfunded Librem 5: April 2019.

The company, which also makes a range of laptops that run on the company’s Linux-based PureOS, previously raised some $2.6 million from backers to build the Librem 5. The idea is to avoid using Android and instead offer an alternative based on a more private, free, and open-source platform to prevent owners from being tracked or spied on.

To that end, the 5-inch Librem 5 is slated to run on PureOS or a range of GNU+Linux distributions, and come with hardware switches to let you disable the camera, mic, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Baseband components.

It’ll cost a discounted $600 until production is complete; the company noted that two CPU bugs affecting power management and power consumption have forced it to push its production schedule back by three months.